Kabbalistic tradition maps the twenty-two Hebrew letters onto the twenty-two paths connecting the ten sefirot of the Tree of Life, the diagram of divine emanation central to Kabbalistic cosmology, so that each letter carries not only a sound and a numeric gematria value but a specific symbolic role within the structure believed to describe how the divine unfolds into creation. This correspondence is elaborated at length within Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Creation, one of the foundational texts of Jewish mysticism, which treats the letters themselves, grouped into three mothers, seven doubles and twelve elementals by the qualities of their pronunciation, as the literal building blocks God used to bring the world into being.
The letter-path correspondence became a central working tool of later Western Hermetic Kabbalah as well, adopted and adapted from the seventeenth century onward by Christian occultists and, later, by ceremonial magic orders such as the Golden Dawn, who layered further correspondences onto each letter and path, tarot trumps, astrological rulers and elemental attributions among them, building an elaborate synthetic system considerably removed from the letters' original Jewish mystical context even while depending entirely on it for its basic structure.